‘Philosophical problems with the GC feminist argument against trans inclusion’

[AgentK]

A friend pointed me in the direction of this journal and I don’t really understand what it is trying to say. Can anyone paraphrase and/or critique it please?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2158244020927029

”he describes this as trans women being "unintelligible as women". In layman's terms, it would be a sign that people do not believe they are women or accept them as women.

”The reason this article and others like it are written using such complicated language is that if they were written using plain English, anyone reading it would be like, "Well, that's because they aren't women, obviously."

It’s funny, but my inbuilt reaction to men moaning that “people do not believe they are women or accept them as women.” isn’t so much "Well, that's because they aren't women, obviously” as “Diddums…”

I suggest sending this link back to your friend:

https://a-question-of-consent.net/2020/06/01/aleardo-zaghellini/

The above is by Maya Forstater, btw

1. you'd have to be insane to think Kathleen Stock is any good arguments
2. Men can go anywhere and do anything they want without a grc at the moment therefore making it easier to get a grc makes no difference.

Strong disagreement with point 1, partial agreement with point 2 but misses the whole point of the GC argument against self id.

Can't be arsed wading much further in - same old same old in pseudo intellectual prose.

Thanks all. I am a genuine poster just not had much time to come back on.
yes the replies have helped. I need to re read some. I’ll do so and post any further qs. Thanks

Good to hear, @AgentK! Good luck. :)

well if you assume TWAW then GC philosophy is incoherent

Maybe so, but most people don't assume this, because males are not women, so it's a meaningless argument. "If you assume the the earth is flat, you shouldn't sail close to the edge".

If you change the meaning of all the words in the sentence "I like a cup of tea in the morning" you can make a convincing argument that the statement is incoherent nonsense; except it isn't.

@SpiderMaam that was a great read, and the article by Sam GFree that Maya links to was an excellent takedown of the paper, unfortunately Medium removed it from their site but it's still available archived: <a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200703193833/medium.com/@gfreesam/a-response-to-aleardo-zanghellinis-critique-of-gender-critical-feminism-8e0c04911c44" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/20200703193833/medium.com/@gfreesam/a-response-to-aleardo-zanghellinis-critique-of-gender-critical-feminism-8e0c04911c44

Pmk for later digestion.

See, I just don’t understand this opinion: Men can go anywhere and do anything they want without a grc at the moment therefore making it easier to get a grc makes no difference

If I said, men can kill anyone, anywhere and anytime they want to at the moment therefore making it easier to get a weapon makes no difference, would you agree with me?

How is that logic different? If laws didn’t matter, why do we have any? Really struggling to see any logic with that argument…

Agreed, DrBlackbird.

The massive difference is that, currently, any man doing this knows that he is doing wrong. That may not stop anybody who is determined to do something, but their behaviour is categorically not being endorsed by the authorities/the majority.

The changes that are going through/being pushed for are not just seeking to legitimise this behaviour, but are actually telling anybody challenging it that they are wrong to do so.

Maya is a very clear thinker and writer and an formidable researcher.

Her and Helen Joyce are my go tos for practical, sensible, legally coherent opinions based in material reality.

I admire Doc Stock enormously (especially her extremely dry wit and stylish wardrobe!!) but Stock is a philosopher and philosophers are not a natural point of call when talking about the practicalities of managing conflicting rights in a pluralistic society.

There is a good comment on the Maya piece re: the dubious peer review process of the article in your OP.

The author isn't a philosopher - he's a law academic. That shouldn't debar him from trying his hand.

However, this piece is just not very good philosophy.

A few things (of many possible):

"It has been argued that gender-critical feminists make a mistake ... third, in not treating gender identity seriously as relevant to determining who counts as a woman." (P.2)
-- Why should we treat gender identity seriously? There is no such thing as gender identity. Gender identities are as serious as paranormal auras or guardian angels.

"... feminist critics of gender-critical feminism insist that we have no
unmediated access to biological realities." (P.3)
-- The author agrees with this insistence, though not on the basis of any argument, just on the bald assertion of a requirement for 'discourse' to enable access. "No unmediated access to biological realities": huh? We can't tell a bull from a cow, a chicken from a fox, ... or a man from a woman? Do cows have "unmediated access to biological realities"? Do chickens? (What 'discourse' do chickens engage in when the fox appears? What 'discourse' enlivens the herd when a bull is brought to the field, or the flock when the ram arrives to tup?) What nonsense this all is. (Of course, we are regaled with reference to Judith Butler's egregious misreading of J.L. Austin. The author of this piece has never read Austin, although "How To Do Things With Words" is there in the refs. They never read it; it's always there.)

Oh, and "Rules are entrenched generalizations." (P.5) No they're not.

At least there's an argument to be had about rules: we could look at Kripke on Wittgenstein, Goodman on "grue" and "entrenchment" ... and so on and so forth. But for the rest, well, "If gender identity exists then ..." gets the author what he wants: ex falso quodlibet, after all. And that's it, really.

Once again, for emphasis: there is no such thing as gender identity.

Again and again genderist "thinkers" fall into the same trap.

Female and male bodied people definitely exist.

A thing called gender identity may exist, but certainly people who feel a thing they associate with the opposite sex to their own, or some partway state, exist.

So, we have the old definition of woman as adult human female, and a newer, conflicting definition of woman as a mental gender.

Also undeniably, there are people claiming to be "women" under both definitions.

But the thing that the first group are, and the thing that the second group feel, are manifestly different things. There is no connection, no continuity between these two concepts. So there is no basis to claim, as genderists are, that the second group are somehow a more - real? authorative? - version of the first group.

In short, the second you try to claim "womanhood" based on gender identity, you immediately and unavoidably undefine it based on sex, and thereby make all pre-existing rights and access of "women" invalid for your new group because by your own acceptance that trans women are women, you are also defining these pre-existing rights as based on something that is not womanhood.

So regardless of whether trans women are women or not, they have no claim on the rights and accesses of "women" that were based on the needs of people of the female sex, either because trans women are not women, or because if trans women are women, then these rights and accesses for people of the female sex are not rights and accesses of women, because women are no longer defined as female.

However you cut it, the rights and accesses of the female sex belong to, and only to, the female sex.

That's what genderists never understand. These rights and accesses are not about the name Woman, they are and always have been about the people who happened to bear that name at the time.

So regardless of whether trans women are women or not, they have no claim on the rights and accesses of "women" that were based on the needs of people of the female sex, either because trans women are not women, or because if trans women are women, then these rights and accesses for people of the female sex are not rights and accesses of women, because women are no longer defined as female.

Yes, exactly. This (better) explains the point I was trying to make about the book Eve where Kate Womersley, the doctor and psychiatrist, reviewer who seemed to agree that TWAW and that we needed more women focused medical research. However, if you believe A, then this rules out B because it is biological men who are TW and it is biological men who are the focus of medical studies. Therefore if you believe TWAW, ipso facto, women are already the focus of medical studies.

However you cut it, the rights and accesses of the female sex belong to, and only to, the female sex.

Meant to… but if the NHS, scientists, sports councils, teachers, civil servants, the police, and, crucially, our politicians believe TWAW then there are no more separate rights for women. Logically, we end up with Sarah’s case whereby there’s a men’s group, a trans gender group, and a group for anyone claiming to be female including a 6 foot bloke in a beard wearing typically male clothes who doesn’t even have to declare he’s a woman as asking him is literal violence.